In a pretty little garden bonnet, with beautiful curling ringlets, with the smartest of aprons and the freshest of pearl-coloured gloves, this amazing woman was in the arms of her dearest Lady Hawbuck.'Dearest Lady Hawbuck, how good of you! Always among my flowers! can't live away from them!'
'Sweets to the sweet! hum--a-ha--haw!' says Sir John Hawbuck, who piques himself on his gallantry, and says nothing without 'a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!'
'Whereth yaw pinnafaw?' cries Master Hugh.'WE thaw you in it, over the wall, didn't we, Pa?'
'Hum--a-ha--a-haw!' burst out Sir John, dreadfully alarmed.'Where's Ponto? Why wasn't he at Quarter Sessions? How are his birds this year, Mrs.Ponto--have those Carabas pheasants done any harm to your wheat? a-hum--a-ha--a-haw!' and all this while he was making the most ferocious and desperate signals to his youthful heir.
'Well, she WATH in her pinnafaw, wathn't she, Ma?' says Hugh, quite unabashed; which question Lady Hawbuck turned away with a sudden query regarding her dear darling daughters, and the ENFANT TERRIBLE was removed by his father.
'I hope you weren't disturbed by the music?' Ponto says.
'My girls, you know, practise four hours a day, you know--must do it, you know--absolutely necessary.As for me, you know I'm an early man, and in my farm every morning at five--no, no laziness for ME.'
The facts are these.Ponto goes to sleep directly after dinner on entering the drawing-room, and wakes up when the ladies leave off practice at ten.From seven till ten, from ten till five, is a very fair allowance of slumber for a man who says he's NOT a lazy man.It is my private opinion that when Ponto retires to what is called his 'Study,' he sleeps too.He locks himself up there daily two hours with the newspaper.
I saw the HAWBUCK scene out of the Study, which commands the garden.It's a curious object, that Study.Ponto's library mostly consists of boots.He and Stripes have important interviews here of mornings, when the potatoes are discussed, or the fate of the calf ordained, or sentence passed on the pig, &c..All the Major's bills are docketed on the Study table and displayed like a lawyer's briefs.Here, too, lie displayed his hooks, knives, and other gardening irons, his whistles, and strings of spare buttons.He has a drawer of endless brown paper for parcels, and another containing a prodigious and never-failing supply of string.What a man can want with so many gig-whips I can never conceive.
These, and fishing-rods, and landing-nets, and spurs, and boot-trees, and balls for horses, and surgical implements for the same, and favourite pots of shiny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes in the most elegant manner, and buckskin gloves stretched out on their trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; and the family medicine-chest, and in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the 'Study' but for that awful purpose)--all these, with 'Mogg's Road Book,' the GARDENERS' CHRONICLE, and a backgammon-board, form the Major's library.Under the trophy there's a picture of Mrs.Ponto, in a light blue dress and train, and no waist, when she was first married; a fox's brush lies over the frame, and serves to keep the dust off that work of art.
'My library's small, says Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, 'but well selected, my boy--well selected.Ihave been reading the "History of England" all the morning.'
